Urban/Community Design

Urban Design, Art, Architecture, Planning and...

noreply@blogger.com (Rex) — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 17:45:00 +0000

Urban Design, Art, Architecture, Planning

The formation of specialized groups helps to manage information and encourage ideas with imagination. The cacophony of thousands of new voices makes this especially important. Urban designers have begun the evaluation of key knowledge assets formed by specialized design groups. (see possibilities below)

The use of standards requires an integrated approach. The desire to accomplish a greater whole is a powerful motivation for bringing urban planning and architecture into a dialogue. (see below)
The UDC of APA Metro seeks a few short answers to three questions that may help to form groups for further inquiry. Please address or debate their relevance to your business/government/personal goals. The discussion will form “information pathways” about New York City the Region and the governance of its dense urban landscape to yield capital.

How will we design information pathways to allow the governance, engineering, and integration of our landscape in a way that fully understands the aesthetic importance of classicism as an integral part of New York City?

The roots of classicism are embedded in our demand for regularity of form and a general insistence on restraint of expression. More recently, everything changed. We are forming groups to examine the disparate attempts to free architecture and art as a derivative of Greek models and Roman principles. This is New York City’s foundation, but not its future.

How will we design information pathways to allow the engineering of our landscape in ways that reflect the technological promise and growing political stature of sustainability?

As a given, we are asked to embrace bold new aesthetic expressions. They are filled with new information about our capacity to manage our carbon or plutonium “footprint” responsibilities. This is a vision that holds a promise to the unborn. We need designers to frame our understanding of earthly survival behaviors and practices that include the means to becoming a just human among all humans.

How will we design information pathways that integrate design, planning, construction, and maintenance?

In New York City, the business of commerce, trade, information technology and design-manufacturing, is the product of an ingenious structure for development, but remains as secretive as possible. To achieve a healthy financing climate secrets retain capital as hard currency but block knowledge capital advancements. If this is a true statement, we seek designers to define these blockages and thereafter produce an integrated decision making platform.

Proposed Knowledge Analysis Teams, Study Groups, Advocates & ResearchersList is in Formation & Additions are Requested, the links lead to a group on this subject...

History: Standards, Metes and Bounds of Urban Design…
Security: Nameless, faceless fear...
Energy: Movement: Streets, wheels, rails, light, air, walk...
Density: NYC’s Maximum Build Out...
Housing: Diversity, Social Context, Means Test...
Work Places: Diversity, Social Context, Means Test...
Information Technology: GIS, TQM, CAD, Critical Path..
Public Participation: checks, balances, voting, conflict reduction...
Market Capture Design: entertainment base, per capata assessments

Design DATA

noreply@blogger.com (Rex) — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 17:44:00 +0000

Question ONE

Is the technological promise of sustainability a trap?

Designers, planners, architects, all of us, suffer from a number of well-documented cognitive failings that distort our ability to predict accurately.

Hey, it is the future. But this could be changing for two reasons:

First, we no longer believe that the unusual event is more salient, and we are less likely to dismiss evidence that contradicts the commonly adopted meaning.
Second, without a doubt, we know our capacity to build for the future does not include knowing what it will mean to people or their lives.

This leads to an inevitable conclusion. The marketing of "the firm" as a group of experts is losing leverage rapidly. New competitors are building open database connectivity (ODBC) as an alternative. What that means is simple - we are all involved, we are all participants. ODBC business partnerships bring unbelievably accurate tools to analyze/improve the urban development process. This is a new kind of knowledge capital and it is already essential to:

1) supplement the design decisions and/or,
2) a completely new framework for decision making in the design reform movement.

The Decline of Expert Discretion

In Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart, Ayres describes the replacement of the “expert” whose knowledge is built on experience and track record and by step-by-step procedures used by computers for data modeling. He argues that anything can be predicted. Just prior to the publication of Super Crunchers, an equally popular book entitled Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner illustrated how extensive analysis of databases reveal hidden causes, and new questions.

Both explore new business structures that replace the expert. They skillfully illustrate how quantitative analyses of massive datasets make hundreds of real-world decisions using algorithms for people asking better questions. The question regarding the removal of traditional roll experts from the policy framework is not when or if, but how quickly it becomes inevitable. Is there any solace in this truth? It seems the answer is yes. The remaining and most important human element is to guess. Guessing requires a test to discover the variables that should and should not be included in statistical analysis, in other words, to generate hypotheses remains ultimately human. To ask “what causes what” remains the most valid human act.

The reality of our present experience coupled with an increasingly dense urban environment is the exponential growth in the number of variables. These “sets” of information are now well beyond our “intuitive” abilities to use, let alone define problems. In addition, these tools are used much in the same way that putting telescopes in space or microscopes in laboratories force new questions. The selection of a series of statistical inferences capable of questioning stored datasets is a vital new tool.

It will help designers to see things never seen. Discovering novelty and asking questions will remain as a vital source of human insight, but sources of data to establish commonality will define the ultimate decision-making structure.

Consensus on Question One

The consensus on this question is, therefore, developing as follows: There is a lack of extensive knowledge regarding viable algorithms useful for defining the aesthetic of the urban living experience.

New questions:

Who should be added to this group to develop the super-crunching urban design discussion?
How is end user experience data made a routine product for design and planning firms in the APA metro area?
How is urban design data produced, made accessible, and used to alter urban design practices?

Two Books:
click and buy and I get .08 cents... Hurray!
Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
and
Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart

Thoughts of the Technium

noreply@blogger.com (Rex) — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 18:22:00 +0000

Thinking does not solve problems it merely expresses the possibility. This vast, uniquely human capacity brings to mind a contemporary criticism of the medical system that defines a healthy person as one who has not been fully worked up. Cities are like that, never fully worked up.

Outside this glorious realm of thoughts and laughs, the work of finding and defining a real, live lie and not the presumption of one is the first step in proving a truth. In this sense, a lie and the truth are brothers. They are born of an honest union in most cases, but now they walk the earth telling stories of their competitive exploits and views on how the world works. In this way, they represent the reasonableness of adjudication systems by asking us to choose between two versions of the truth. They differ and vary in detail, but present honest interpretations. They learn from us that we in the audience will pick the one we like most, making our choice a matter of categorical interest over factual accuracy.

Please take comfort in this chaotic combination of inductive and deductive processes, that from the specific to the general, and from the general to the specified, because it evolves in stages. First, the legal concepts build up as cases are compared. Second level stages wrestle for a while with the inherent ambiguity of language. The most dramatic arguments are about causation. The causes of global warming are most well known. In this mix, the concept becomes exclusive, while the process of reasoning continues to place specific events inside and outside of the concept. A third condition or stage emerges as reasoning through these examples moves ahead until matters of kind move into matters of mathematical degree leading to the breakdown of the concept. New discrete components form. Get it? It is back to basics.

Change occurs in a kind of 3D matrix that defines where, when and why ideas ignite into use. These “four vehicular accidents equal one stop sign” solution is a problem because there is no proof in preemption. Nevertheless, the assignment of natural resource consumption rates is concrete. This is the “unsafe at any speed” narrative for our century. As consumption rates begin to exceed the earth’s replacement capacity, the examples of kind will have measurable quantities. Most of it is about making stuff directly attributable to the loss of life or a quality of it on predictable, known parts of the earth.

I would work the concept you are developing in the climate change cases as the law against the presumption of entitled consumption. Take these steps:

Step back, look at the roots of technology, and decide to become comfortable with getting to know the arc of this change.
Look at how the making of things expresses human genius. The idea that we have to make or acquire stuff to find "ultimate expression" misses the point. It is about the choice of stuff to make.
Private Workshop Project. Transect the ground between any two things, perhaps a collection of bobble-head dolls and the a set of computers at home and work. Realize measures for a cult of personalities and the acquisition of gigabytes. Now do it this with one thousands of “things” and make choices using tools such as the Good Guide.
Accept the opportunity of this the 1 thru 3 process and expect change, but do not expect to know what it will mean.
Public Workshop Project. Imagine a world before language as a whisper of thought and a fragment of an individuals imagination. Write down what you really need and want to know. Share it.
Now imagine knowing everything of your world within the system itself. As if a tree had knowledge of all trees. Do you see less stuff and more life? If not go back to step one
Make your own step seven to acquire the knowledge implied and you will become comfortable with dense idea activism and life.

All of the above is how I imagined Kevin Kelly might make an argument for a new kind of quality of life. given added restraints. It would develop in what he calls the “technium” and it is described in his book What Technology Wants. As I examine the possible formation of a super urban density, I also see it as a direct way to support the design of major improvements in public human capital investments also called knowledge capital.

There is one very important public policy change required if it is to be successful in expressing the freedom of people. When defining the relevant economic and environmental conditions for social capital investment, the tendency is to view these investments in a broad social dimension. This means a local education budget in NYC for education cannot capture this investment for local use as it might end up in Los Angeles. It is a flaw in the Republic that policy makers attempt to balance through immigration law.

These days are ending and this overall approach typically disregards the experience of individuals in obtaining viable social capabilities. The type found by the well-known midrange of Maslow’s hierarchy. These two elements (persons and social capacity) are not always in harmony and regardless of the physical design, the public responsibility of governance is assure the individual the widest possible set of choices.

For example, the lack of balance in these policies would be immediately apparent by measuring the number of individuals able to choose among a variety of social dimensions vs. the number who are highly targeted to a limited number. Rarely is the amount of money at the core of the issue as framed by class or race, it is more typically evident by the lack of choice and made more complicated if it becomes pervasive.

Runing With the Bulls

noreply@blogger.com (Rex) — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 17:53:00 +0000

Running from the Bulls or Riding One

Why PlaNYC.gov became is a good lesson in planning.

Real and imagined unknowns are part of our embedded information society, but the big picture keeps getting bigger. How and why New York City keeps secrets is the stuff of its greatness. Despite the call for transparency and more open society, government officials, business leaders, and human rights advocates share the mantra of the bull rider that says, don’t get killed the moment the gate opens. The preference for advanced knowledge includes knowing that it will throw you off if you're on it, but it may not trample you if you run well.

There are many ways to look at introducing a new idea; you can bring in advisors, experts, consultants to test the bull for weaknesses and its moves. A relevant example involves the members of the advisory council used for the 2030 PlaNYC.gov project. They were asked to hear it first, keep it quiet, and begin to prepare their respective constituencies with ideas about changing the city to solve problems, meet needs, or produce higher levels of confidence. Knowing or unknowingly they entered New York’s version of a time-honored practice known as the “running from the bulls” instead of riding. The decision to ride them would have resulted in three of the most famous bull that threw every single rider who attempted to last eight seconds.

Bodacious - Climate Change
Blueberry Wine - Sustainability
Bushwacker - Resilience

The PlaNYC link initially went to civic engagement sight.
It now points to the Mayor's Office of Recovery and Resilience

Whether they are advocates for community planning, housing or environmental activists, business or labor leaders, everyone one of them has their own bull to ride or dodge. They also have some foreknowledge about successful placement within the arena, with the running crowd or on a balcony above the fray. This is an OK thing. It is the burden of either leading or getting out of the way.

Whether the 2030 Plan wound up becoming the Olympic plan in a green dress or the World’s Greatest Bull ride, the San Fermin Festival, or where it actually wound up in Office of Recovery and Resiliency, one single truth is made clear. This truth comes in increments raised a simple cup of ideas begin held secret before they are shared. NYC will argue for a better life for all residents regardless of income. This is no secret, and it makes a great city, one of beauty.

New ideas must meet this first test, whether it is pressing to remove transfats or bringing all New Yorkers to the shocking realization that the cost running the MTA is a financial responsibility that travels well beyond that paid by its riders.

We cannot pretend that the burden of financing NYC’s glory in the American sense or its survival in a global sense is the exclusive responsibility of the Mayor, his team or our political representatives. It is every “Jack one” of us. The hard questions about this responsibility are like secrets. The real test is upon us all to start talking about them, vote on them, participate in your community in ways that you are comfortable. It is as that simple. The tag line in the Plan for NYC is absolutely correct, and over a decade ago it predicted the future. Fight for it or lose it.